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Archive for the tag “portraits”

I have never been to Waterford in Ireland, but having just browsed at leisure through their museum’s wonderful website, I feel as if I know the city intimately. There are virtual tours that really do make the viewer feel present. Thoroughly recommended!

This figure is from one of the virtual tours, and depicts an incredibly lifelike, believable Edward III, copied from the medieval illustration to (our) right.

Like this:

Lurking? Well, apart from me, of course, and my camera (which I managed to mess up rather, so apologies for the quality of the two portrait-photos, which were taken on 9th June 2018.

Richard and Elizabeth of York were among the many portraits. Of course, there having been so many Fitzalans and Howards at Arundel over the centuries, there weren’t many from the medieval period. If Henry VII sneaked in, I didn’t spot him. I couldn’t get in front of the portraits, or even all that close, so these were the best I could manage. Again, sorry they’re such poor quality.

The picture I took of John Howard’s (1st Duke of Norfolk) portrait was blurred, and so I have found it online. His portrait was large, and had pride of place, so I imagine they are proud of him. And rightly so, of course.

Since first writing this article, I have learned (courtesy of Susan Troxell) more about the portrait of Richard III. She made enquiries at Arundel Castle, and received the following from Dr John Martin Robinson, Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk:-

“Thankyou for your email. It is likely that the portrait of Richard III belonged to Lord Lumley in the 16th century, and was acquired from him with other family portraits by his nephew Thomas, the ‘Collector’ Earl of Arundel in the early 17th century. And then by descent in the Howard family.”

Thank you for your help, Susan.

All in all, Arundel Castle was an excellent experience, except for all the nineteenth-century Gothic. If you want to get up into the keep, beware. There are 131 steps, and dire warnings of the fact. My ill-tempered knees had the habdabs at the mere prospect, so I didn’t call their bluff!!!

I must have read about this before, but it feels new somehow. Supposedly, the man in blue (see below) is Richard of Gloucester/Richard III. The illustration is part of the Coventry Tapestry, which is housed in St Mary’s Guild Hall, and which is still in the place for which it was created. I wasn’t sure if the kneeling king on the bottom left was EIV or HVII (the latter didn’t seem likely, as the figure is alive, and Richard certainly wasn’t when Henry became king).

“A figure depicted in the magnificent 500 year old tapestry at St. Mary’s Guildhall could well be one of the earliest depictions of King Richard III, whose remains, discovered in 2012 beneath a Leicester car park, were recently confirmed as those of the controversial English monarch.

“The tapestry’s highly detailed design includes seventy five individual characters, including angels, saints, apostles, and noble members of a royal court, arranged around a central image of the Virgin Mary. Whilst no contemporary records exist as to the exact identity of many of the characters, certain clues have been observed that strongly suggest that Richard is amongst them.

[See illustrations below for the footnotes in the text.]

“Firstly, the figure is shown carrying a coin ¹ in his right hand, used elsewhere in art of the time to represent a ‘Judas’ character with a history of treachery for personal gain, whilst in his left hand the figure was originally depicted holding a snake ² – another emblem of evil and deviousness – which at a later date was removed leaving a distinctive outline.

“By way of further evidence, the figure bears a striking resemblance to two of the earliest, and most trusted, portraits of King Richard III in the collection of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, from eye colour and hair curls, right down to slightly deformed hands and misshapen shoulders ³. Intriguingly, it has been proposed that one of these portraits was painted by Sir Thomas More, who may have been familiar with the tapestry as he came to Coventry on several occasions to visit his sister who lived in the city.

“Whilst Richard III had died a few years before the dating of the tapestry, it is thought that the tapestry depicts an earlier period, that of King Henry VI – who is also shown on the tapestry – when Richard was Richard of Gloucester. Henry VI was revered for many years after his death, with miracles even recorded in his name, and he was fondly remembered in Coventry where he chose to base himself and his royal court for a period during the Wars of the Roses. Under the new Tudor monarchy of Henry VII it was politically wise to maintain, and even encourage, adoration of the much-loved Henry VI. Moreover, showing such respect for the old Lancastrian King Henry, gave the Tudor monarch a chance to boost his image, tarnished by his weak claim to the throne and the manner in which he seized it from the Yorkist Richard III in battle.

“There were suspicions that Richard was linked to the death of King Henry VI in 1471, and placing Richard in the tapestry with symbols of dastardly deeds may have been a subtle piece of propaganda, with those behind the tapestry not only remembering their favourite king, but also pleasing the new Tudor monarchy by presenting Richard as the baddie in this wonderful woven story.”

Steve Beer, who owns fine art gallery The Medieval Gallery in Dunster, Somerset, is set to host a major event on December 1, called ‘Picturing Richard’s World’. The event will be staged in two parts – first, the talks and displays at Dunster Tithe Barn, followed by the unveiling of the new portrait, which is by Danish artist Anne Gyrite Schütte.

Leonardo di ser Piero “da Vinci” (below left) was nearly six months older than Richard III, having been born in the Republic of Florence on 15 April 1452. Over his lifetime, which ended in 1519, he is best known for his paintings, such as The Last Supper or la Gioconda. However, he also left us a number of remarkable engineering and other sketches, depicting human and animal biology, geology and devices, including flying machines. The anatomical diagrams would have contributed towards the quality of his portraits in the same way that Stubbs studied the physiology of horses.

On the right is his 1488 design for a flying machine. In this, the centenary of the Armistice and of the RAF, it is interesting to compare it with aircraft from the First World War and to note that Leonardo also theoretically described a parachute, a concept with which later pilots would be very familiar.

This very informative BBC documentary, presented by Dr. Bendor Grosvenor, showed how a portrait, presently on display in Glasgow, was proved to be an original Rubens. George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was a courtier and soldier, serving under both James VI/I and Charles I as well as being a possible partner of the former. He was assassinated in 1628 and the portrait (left) dates from about three years before this.

Villiers’ line fared no better than their predecessors in their tenure of the Buckingham title. Just as two of the three Stafford Dukes were executed and one killed at Northampton over their 67 years, Villiers’ son went into exile in France after serving in Charles II’s “CABAL” – he left no male heir and both his brothers had already died without issue. The title was recreated, with Normanby, for John Sheffield in 1703 but his male line expired in 1735 whilst Richard Grenville’s family held it, with Chandos, from 1822-89.

Well, I was at a temporary loose end, pondering what to do to while away a Saturday afternoon…and what did I come up with? Why, assembling scenes of the deaths of monarchs of England. Of course. The devil makes work for idle hands, and mine were indeed idle.

So here are our kings and queens, from Edward the Confessor to Elizabeth I. The line was drawn at the Stuarts, Georgians and so on, in whom I am just not particularly interested. Some of the monarchs who did interest me were most reluctant to divulge their death, funeral or burial scenes, and for them I had to settle for tomb effigies and the like.

The only trouble is…well, when push comes to shove, so to speak…a monarch dying in a bed is, well, someone dying in a bed. It’s difficult for even the most talented artist to come up with something different. At least Elizabeth I seems to have opted for the floor at the foot of her bed, which was indeed an innovative move.

Some of the scenes are the stuff of myth or legend, for example the death of Henry VI…by a murderer who couldn’t be anyone other than Richard of Gloucester. And then there’s the death of Edward V and his brother, smothered so vilely in their beds on the orders of that same Richard. Another is the illustration of a remarkably svelte Henry VIII commending his son, Edward VI, to rule in his place. Did Henry really lose that much weight before dying?

Anyway, here goes:-

Edward the Confessor

Harold Godwinson

Edward the Confessor, 1042-1066, and Harold Godwinson, 1066 If Harold did indeed die in this way. The Bayeux Tapestry is certain he did.

William I

William II

William the Conqueror, 1066-1087 and William Rufus, 1087-1100

Henry I

King Stephen

Henry I, 1100-1135, and King Stephen, 1135-1154

Matilda’s Memorial in Rouen Cathedral

Henry II

Empress Matilda, 1141, and Henry II, 1154-1189

Richard I, the Lionheart

King John

Richard I, the Lionheart, 1189-1199, and King John, 1199-1216

Henry III

Edward I

Henry III, 1216-1272, and Edward I, 1272-1307

Edward II

Edward III

Edward II, 1307-1327, and Edward III, 1327-1377. Was Edward II really killed in such a horrific way? And what was the truth about Alice Perrers and Edward III’s rings?

Richard II

Henry IV on his deathbed with his son, the future Henry V

Richard II, 1377-1399, and Henry IV, 1399-1413

Henry V

Henry VI

Henry V, 1413-1422, and Henry VI, 1422-1461 Yes, Henry VI’s murderer just has to be Richard of Gloucester. And just look at those evil spurs! Only Beelzebub would have such things!

Edward IV

Edward V

Edward IV, 1461-1483, and Edward V, 1483. I won’t bother with the break in Edward IV’s reign. As for the deaths of the boys in the Tower. Well, Richard again, of course. No one else in the whole wide world had even a teensy motive for being rid of them. Right?

Like this:

As we mentioned here, Ashdown-Hill’s biography of Richard’s mother was published in April. Whilst his latest, to which we shall return later, was released today, we shall concentrate on Cecily here.

This is the book that summarises Cecily’s life by delineating her full and half-siblings, demonstrating that portraits (right) previously assumed to be of her and Richard, Duke of York, are of other people. Ashdown-Hill then lists her pregnancies and shows where each of her children were probably born – there is no mention of a Joan but there is further evidence about the birth date of the future Edward IV and Cecily’s ordeals during the first peak of the Roses battles. He deduces how much she knew and how she probably felt about Edward’s bigamy and the Wydevilles, together with the part she played, as a Dowager Duchess, in Richard III’s coronation, but also her years living under Henry VII and a “between the lines” interpretation of her will.

In all, the eighty years of Cecily’s life, survived only by two of her daughters are described in great detail in a book that demonstrates further painstaking research by an author who clearly knows even more about the fifteenth century than he did two years ago.

Right at the start of this series, Helen Castor (left) takes a black marker pen and illustrates the cause of the 1553 crisis on a large sheet of paper. Beginning with Henry VII, very few of his legitimate male descendants were alive at the start of that year – eliminating the obvious illegitimate cases, we have Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, aged seven (a Catholic in Scotland) and Edward VI, aged fifteen, whose health took a turn for the worse at that time. There were, however, nine healthy legitimate female descendants: Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary Stewart who was Lady Margaret’s niece of ten and already crowned in Scotland (but living as a Queen consort in France), Henry VIII’s two bastardised, but included by law, daughters Mary and Elizabeth, Lady Frances Grey (nee’ Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk in suo jure) and her three daughters Jane, Catherine and Mary together with Frances’ niece Lady Margaret Clifford. In short, the “Tudor” male line was on the propinquity of its termination, although a medical explanation for this was not given.

In the first programme, Castor showed how Edward’s “devise for my succession” developed during that fateful year. First, he hopes that one of the Protestant Grey sisters will have a male heir to succeed him with Frances as the new King’s grandmother and Regent. Then his illness accelerated and there are crossings out on the devise, such that “the Lady Jane’s heires male” becomes “the Lady Jane AND HER heires male”, in the hope that he will live long enough for Parliament to enact this document and supersede Henry VIII’s own legislation, which named the Catholic Mary as heir after Edward, although the Greys would be preferred to the Stewarts. On the left is the “Streatham Portrait“, previously thought to have been of Jane, but not commissioned until half a century later.

During the first half of 1553, Lady Jane was married to Lord Guildford Dudley, son of the Duke of Northumberland who was Lord Protector at the time. Lady Catherine Grey also married, as did Guildford’s sisters, one to Lord Henry Hastings, later Earl of Huntingdon. In the event, fate overtook Edward’s plans and his devise, as letters patent, had no legal status at his death on 6 July. Darnley’s claim as the last “Tudor” male was to be ignored and England was to have a Queen Regent, as Northumberland took his son and new daughter-in-law from Bradgate in Leicestershire, via Sion House to the Royal Apartments in the Tower for her reign to be proclaimed on 10 July, although Jane took the fateful decision that her husband was to be created Duke of Clarence and not King.

In the second programme, Castor explains how the Privy Council erred by sending Northumberland to East Anglia to arrest Mary, removing the realm’s best military commander from the capital, where the professional soldiers and their weapons were. Mary moved from Kenninghall in Norfolk to Framlingham Castle to strengthen her position and gathered support from those who still adhered to her Catholic faith and who had “known” her from afar for her whole life. There was to be no arrest of Mary, nor was there to be a pitched battle as Henry VIII’s first-born child outmanoeuvred Northumberland, at his Cambridge base, in order to march upon London.

The third episode begins with a naval mutiny ensuring that Mary had some artillery to enforce her claimand the Privy Council officially dethroning Jane. Mary took the Tower, Jane, Guildford and their fathers became prisoners and Mary was proclaimed. For Jane, there could be no return to her earlier life at Bradgate. Except for Northumberland, there was to be no trial until November and even then Jane, Guildford and Suffolk had their sentences of death suspended – until Thomas Wyatt rebelled in the Protestant interest in mid-January, in protest at Mary’s plans to marry Phillip II. Mary then signed the three death warrants, the teenage couple went to the block on February 12th and Jane’s father eleven days later. Cranmer, who had been part of her Privy Council, was attainted and deprived but lived to face Mary’s further wrath at a later date. Darnley married the other Queen Mary and was killed a year or two later in his own realm. For nearly fifty years from that July day when Edward VI’s eyes closed for the last time, England had no male claimant descended from Henry VII and the throne was disputed solely by Queens Regnant.

Castor concludes by pointing out that Jane, proclaimed Queen by the Privy Council who had served Edward VI, should be reckoned as a real monarch of England, even though she had been illegally proclaimed and then dethroned. In some ways, her turbulent final year taught her cousin Elizabeth a valuable lesson – not to take a husband, especially as the most likely such candidate was her fellow survivor: Lord Guildford Dudley’s younger brother, Robert.

On the right is Paul Delaroche’s highly inaccurate painting of Jane’s end, painted as late as 1834. His version of her execution takes place indoors but we know that she died on Tower Green, as did most beheaded women.

For those of us more focused on the fifteenth century, we will be familiar with the concepts of a king Edward whose death was not announced for several days whilst a faction sought to establish control (1483) and of prisoners being executed to clear the way for a Spanish marriage (1499).

No, no, we all know that’s NOT the way the rhyme goes…however, apparently, some publishers do not know the difference between the English king and the explorer Christopher Columbus. A picture of Henry VII, labelled as Columbus, recently appeared in a child’s history textbook (see link below)!

(above, Henry and Columbus, not exactly looking like they were seperated at birth. Similar taste in hats, maybe?)

Henry, however, did have a slight connection to Columbus. In 1489, Columbus’ brother Bartholomew made his way to England seeking funding for Christopher’s voyages. On the way, he was attacked by pirates and arrived in England in a poverty-stricken state. He was not received terribly well by Henry, and it was soon clear that not one solitary penny was forthcoming. Bartholomew tried the French king next —still no joy. Then he went to Spain….and the rest is history.

Later, Henry did decide he better get ‘with it’ and do some new world exploration to keep up with Ferdinand and Isabella. 1497, he hired the Venetian John Cabot to go to the New World. Cabot made his first landing at (disputably) Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland, Canada.

Upon his return to England, Henry was not exactly forthcoming with lavish payment—Cabot got a rather paltry £10.00. Now Henry DID have other things on his mind at that time—namely Perkin Warbeck. Once he dealt with that little problem, he gave Cabot a monetary

increase…of £2.00. Later, he did give him a somewhat more substantial but not overly generous pension of £20.00 a year, with the stipulation he made more voyages and tried to do some trading with the natives while he was at it.

Cabot did return to North America but he found no natives, only the remains of a burnt out fire and a stone tool.

Right: Jim Dale, who played Christopher Columbus in the eponymous quincentenary Carry On. (and now that I think of it, maybe there IS a resemblance in the pic on the right??)